Access Policy
Royal Mint Museum Access Policy
Name of Museum: Royal Mint Museum (RMM)
Name of governing body: Royal Mint Museum Board of Trustees
Date approved by governing body: 5 March 2024
Date at which policy due for review: February 2025
Purpose and Access Statement
The Museum is committed to welcoming all members of society regardless of sex, gender, age, social status, ethnic origin, ability, language, faith, location, wealth, and cultural or social background, by minimising or removing barriers to engagement with the collection. We recognise that access is a complex issue and this policy is reviewed on a regular basis to maximise accessibility.
Scope
This policy covers the Royal Mint Museum’s physical spaces, engagement projects, and digital channels.
The primary physical space is the Royal Mint Museum, which is situated on the Royal Mint site in Llantrisant, South Wales, Visits are conducted on an individual basis and tailored to meet the visitor’s needs. These visits may be confined to the Museum or as part of a visit to the whole Royal Mint site. Visitors may include researchers, volunteers, other museum professionals, Royal Mint staff and Royal Mint customers.
A paid visitor attraction, the Royal Mint Experience, provides a secondary physical space, featuring a public-facing curated exhibition of collection highlights and stories.
Engagement projects include the Reminiscence Box project, in which collection items are loaned to care groups and community groups, school visits to the Royal Mint Experience and virtual classroom activities, and community group and academic talks and lectures undertaken by Museum staff off-site.
Digital channels include the Museum website and online articles, Museum social media channels, as well as our online library and Collection Online tools.
The Museum maintains extended physical access to the collection through a permanent exhibition at the Tower of London and international collection loans and is committed to supporting these partner organisations in promoting access.
Responsibilities
The Museum Director and Board of Trustees are responsible for ensuring the Museum meets its obligations under the Equality Act (2010) by doing everything possible to make the collection and services accessible to the widest possible range of people.
Every member of Museum staff is responsible for developing, delivering and maintaining physical and digital spaces in a way that is accessibility-forward and actively seeks to dismantle barriers to audience engagement, while ensuring the safety and longevity of the collection.
Defining Our Commitment to Access
This policy provides a framework that strives to include all our visitors, potential visitors and staff.
‘Access’ in this context covers the opportunity to engage with the collection, spaces, expertise, and engagement activities of the Royal Mint Museum. The barriers to access addressed in this policy are in regular review and include:
Physical and Sensory access: e.g. people with mobility, hearing or visual impairments who may find it difficult to access physical Museum spaces, activity types or digital channels.
Intellectual access: e.g. people who may have learning disabilities, who may have varying degrees of English-language skill or who may find the Museum too specialist or elitist in content or approach.
Geographic access: e.g. people who live too far away from the Museum to visit our physical spaces or benefit from our engagement activities.
Financial access: e.g. people who may not be able to afford to access Museum exhibitions or take part in groups to which engagement activities are offered.
Technological access: e.g. people who do not have access to, or regularly use, the internet.
Cultural access: e.g. people who may feel the Museum does not reflect their cultural or social heritage or is not ‘for’ them.
Attitudinal access: e.g. people who may lack interest in or awareness of the Museum and its spaces or services.
Commitment to Access
The Museum is committed to maximising access by, for example:
Physical and Sensory Access
The core Museum collection is split across two floors, accessible via a lift, and all visitors are escorted by a member of staff. There is designated parking for visitors including disabled spaces, close to the Royal Mint Reception. Visitors participating in a behind-the-scenes tour of the Royal Mint are provided with personal protective equipment and toilets including disabled toilets are available throughout the site. Wheelchairs are available and drop curbs are present at all pedestrian crossings.
Visitors to the Royal Mint Experience visitor centre have available designated parking and disabled parking spaces close to a step-free entrance. The exhibition galleries, café and toilets are level access, and the site has automatic doors, large-print signage and a hearing loop. On-site Museum engagement projects, such as school visits and talks, are held in a dedicated space in the visitor centre.
Intellectual Access
The physical visitor centre spaces are fully bilingual in English and Welsh and large print and audio-visual stations are placed around the exhibition. Phrasing and content of signage has been carefully considered to ensure maximum accessibility and simplicity of language.
The Museum operates a range of engagement activities suitable for participants of all ages, backgrounds and linguistic abilities. Specific schools sessions have been created for different age groups, and provision and sessions are available for special educational needs school groups and home educated groups. The Reminiscence Box project features audio-described collections as well as visual and tactile aids and is available bilingually in English and Welsh.
Museum digital channels frequently highlight large, visually appealing images with captions, accompanied by both simple and longer-form explanations. Museum staff answer public enquiries on a weekly basis, on a range of topics.
Geographic Access
Owing to the Museum’s location in South Wales, much of its engagement activity is remote or digital-focused. The Reminiscence Box project operates nationally, and over 1,000 boxes of collection items and activities have been loaned to care homes and community groups around the country since 2020. Virtual Visits are made freely available via a booking system on the Museum website, to enable nation-wide schools’ engagement, and Museum staff frequently travel or use digital delivery systems to provide public information or academic talks across the country.
The Royal Mint Experience visitor centre offers coach parking for groups travelling from further afield, as well as discounted access for local residents and community groups.
The Museum regularly hosts smaller, temporary exhibitions of collections items in other locations around the country, including a permanent exhibition in the Tower of London. Highlights from the collection are also on permanent or temporary loan to museums around the country, including the British Museum, the Science Museum, the Design Museum, Museum on the Mound, and the Ashmolean Museum. Some items from the collection are also on loan internationally to Canada.
Financial Access
The Royal Mint Experience visitor centre is a ticketed exhibition. Reduced-cost tickets are available for gallery access and collections viewing only without a Royal Mint tour, and also for local area residents. Carer tickets are supplied for free for visitors with physical access requirements. Highlights from the collection are also loaned to museums such as the British Museum which offer free entry.
All content on the Royal Mint Museum website and digital channels is available freely, including digitised scans of past temporary exhibitions from the visitor centre. A wealth of free supplementary digital content is produced for each exhibition section, and similarly to accompany all schools’ sessions or engagement talks.
Royal Mint Museum engagement projects including virtual visits, teaching resources, the annual Short Story Competition, the Reminiscence Box project, and community talks and tours, are all offered without cost. A bilingual version of the Reminiscence Boxes is available, and Short Story Competition entries are welcomed in any language.
Technological Access
The Royal Mint Museum engagement projects are available digitally to serve a wide geographical audience, but “low-tech” options are available in most instances. Reminiscence Boxes supplied to care-homes around the country include clear instructions for discussion sessions and audio-visual content is used to enhance the content rather than as a requirement. Physical submission is possible for the short story competition and in-person access to the Museum collection is available for research appointments.
In-person sessions for school visits are held frequently at the Royal Mint Experience visitor centre, and Museum staff travel nationwide to host general interest talks at request.
Cultural Access
The Museum’s expertise is the work of the Royal Mint, focused on the milled coinage of England and the United Kingdom from 1660 onwards, as well as the global work of the Royal Mint in striking coins internationally. We recognise that this remit risks being inherently exclusive and actively seek to change the way we tell stories about items in the collection with a move towards a global, people-first focus.
As part of our ongoing work to recontextualise the collection, resources are available as part of the Royal Mint Experience visitor centre exhibition and the Museum website and digital channels relating to a broad range of audiences. Recent website and exhibition content have focused particularly on examining the presence of people of the global majority (formerly ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic’) in the Mint workforce and women at the Mint.
Attitudinal Access
We similarly recognise that the Museum’s remit is of specific interest and we actively seek to move the work of the Museum beyond numismatic circles. A broad range of engagement activities are hosted for groups who have not traditionally been engaged in numismatics as an area of study or leisure activity, including children, women, and local history groups.
The Museum’s current and upcoming projects, around which exhibitions, web content, and revised engagement activities are developed, focus on a broad reach of general interest content, including coins and the sea, science, Isaac Newton, and money in culture.
Continuing improvement
This policy is reviewed on an annual basis and is next due for review in February 2025. Responsibility for review sits with the Public Information and Engagement Officer.